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[DCapps]

6TH MICHAEL R. ARGETSINGER SYMPOSIUM ON INTERNATIONAL MOTOR RACING HISTORY

 

After a hiatus of two years due to the pandemic, the International Motor Racing Research Center (IMRRC) is again partnering with the Society of Automotive Historians (SAH) to present the Sixth Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on Motor Racing history. The event, geared to both motor racing scholars and racing enthusiasts, will take place on Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5, 2022. In conjunction with the on-site sessions in Watkins Glen, open to the public at no charge, the Symposium hopes to provide virtual capability to allow remote attendance and participation for a modest fee. Over the last several years the Symposium has established itself as a unique and respected scholarly forum and has gained a growing audience of students and enthusiasts. 

 

The Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium provides an opportunity for scholars, researchers and writers to present their work related to the history of automotive competition and the cultural impact of motor racing to their peers and to the motor racing community in general. In keeping with the ongoing theme of “The Cultural Turn Meets the First Turn” the IMRRC and SAH will solicit abstracts of presentations and will coordinate the selection of papers, expert panels and a keynote speaker. A Call for Papers (CFP) will be issued soon and we encourage scholars, journalists and serious motor racing writers of all descriptions to participate in this endeavor.

 

Watch this page (michael-r-argetsinger-symposium-international-motor-racing-history) for further information as planning proceeds for the 2022 Symposium. 

[DCapps]

Here are the announcements for the Call For Papers for the 6th Michael Argetsinger Symposium to be held in Watkins Glen, New York, in early November 2021:

 

the Society of Automotive Historians (https://autohistory.org)

 

and

 

the International Motor Racing Research Center  (https://www.racingar...racing-history/)

 

Since it will be a hybrid events, with presentations being given both digitally and in-person, this is an excellent opportunity for those who might not be able to personally attend to participate.

[DCapps]

The 6th Argetsinger Symposium is just four weeks away. 

 

Trevor Lister and I are presenting a paper on the apparently touchy subject of IDENTITY as it applies in certain instances.

 

We will endeavor to explain it in such a way that even some who seem impervious to the concept MIGHT be able to grasp the point.

 

Then again....

[DCapps]

The presentations for this year's Argetsinger Symposium:

 

The Friday (4 November) schedule.

 

James Miller | F1: From Circus to Media Spectacle
James Miller’s engagement with F1 includes chatting about race strategy with Nicki Lauda at the 1977 USGP, where Lauda won his second world championship. Now it involves at-home viewing of real-time, in-car camera images on a flat-screen TV. Has Formula One left behind its gritty, dangerous and somewhat esoteric past to become a cross between the World Cup and Disneyland (think Miami)? How much of its new global popularity can be summed up as (perhaps merely) “media spectacle?” Miller is professor emeritus of communications at Hampshire College. He has studied new media as a Fulbright researcher in Paris and a visiting professor at MIT’s Media Lab.

 

Mark D. Howell | Living Loud, Living Fast: Connections Between Musicians and Motorsports

Mark Howell is a Professor of Communications at Northwestern Michigan College. Prior to NMC, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University. As a motorsports historian, Dr. Howell has published numerous articles and two books: From Moonshine to Madison Avenue: A Cultural History of the NASCAR Winston Cup Series (U of Wisconsin/Popular Press, 1997) and Motorsports and American Culture: From Demolition Derbies to NASCAR (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), of which he was a co-editor. Since 2011, he has been a Senior Writer for Frontstretch.com, where his essays appear every Wednesday during the racing season. Dr. Howell also spent three years (2001-2003) as a part-time crew member with Brett Bodine Racing in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series, and has worked closely with NASCAR drivers Hut Stricklin, Kenny Wallace, and Todd Bodine.

Dr. Howell’s presentation for this year’s Symposium Living Loud and Living Fast will explore the connections between musicians and motorsports. The presentation highlights how several well-known professional musicians from diverse genres took their interest in high-performance vehicles to regional, national, and sometimes even international levels of motor racing competition.

 

Mario Felice Tecce | Racing as a Paradigm for Pursuing the Best – presented via Zoom
Dr. Tecce received his M.D. and PhD. at the University of Naples, Italy, and is currently full professor of Biochemistry at University of Salerno. Besides his molecular research about cancer mechanisms, he explored race car driving as a major reference paradigm of pursuing the best and of free will exercise. Having a strong interest and deep passion for car racing, he analyzed Formula One seasons of the last fifty years and suggests that race car driving can be a major example of general life choices between good and bad in a joint competition to pursue the best possible.

 

Roundtable: Timothy Robeers, Mike Stocz, Katya “Kate” Sullivan | Aspects of Media Treatments of Motor Racing Topics – presented via Zoom

Mike Stocz is a senior lecturer of sport management & leadership at the University of New Hampshire. He is one of the founding members and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Motorsport Culture & History. Mike’s previous works have included a bottom up framing analysis of the Tony Stewart-Kevin Ward Jr. incident on Facebook, as well as works within legal issues in K-12 sport administration, an economic funding model for college athletics, and a textual analysis of the American Outlaws fan group in the digital space.

Kate Sullivan is an Assistant Professor in Strategy & Enterprise at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University, where she teaches a range of entrepreneurship and management courses as well as conducts research as a well-being and performance psychologist. In addition to her academic career, she has worked in the classic car industry for more than a decade.  Ms. Sullivan personally holds several regional land-speed records.

In the roundtable, she explores the forgotten history of alternative power vehicles in motorsport, demonstrating that the current concerns over the environmental impacts of auto racing –and the attendant hand-wringing over its future –are far from new. Showing how alternative power vehicles have been part of society’s need for speed from the beginning, she will suggest how to harness this worry to instead create new buzz for racing.

 

Quinn Beekwilder, Trey Cunningham | Lessons Learned: A Pedagogical Approach to Teaching Motorsports History 

Quinn Beekwilder is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the motorsport management degree at Belmont Abbey College. Having come from a decade of working at Charlotte Motor Speedway, he wanted to give back to the motorsport program at Belmont Abbey that got him there in the first place. He has a unique perspective of being one of the first graduates of the program and is able to address concerns and direct the program for the greater benefit of current students. Motorsport history has always been a passion of Mr. Beekwilder. The approaches that he takes to the course are crafted to focus on the historical development of NASCAR while incorporating experiential activities to support the curriculum. The students refer to Mr. Beekwilder as the fast van driver.

Dr. Cunningham is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sport and Motorsport Management at Belmont Abbey College. Belmont Abbey College offers a four-year undergraduate academic program designed to prepare aspiring professionals and leaders for a career in the motorsport industry. The presentation will discuss Belmont Abbey College’s pedagogical approach to introducing and reinforcing the history of motorsports throughout the entire curriculum. Moreover, Dr. Cunningham’s presentation will discuss the many perceived lessons learned and ever-evolving adjustments made along the way in the Department’s efforts to successfully prepare students to become lifelong learners of the history of motorsports.

 

Jonathan Summers | Motor Racing as a Mediated Experience 

Jon Summers is a teaching assistant and guest lecturer at Stanford University. He’s an independent automotive historian, podcaster, blogger and Pebble Beach Docent. A lifelong car and motorcycle enthusiast, Jon’s recent work has focused on historiography in motor racing, delving into not just what happened, but how these stories were preserved, by whom and why. From text and still photography through television and now to YouTube, Goodwood and Gran Turismo, Jon’s presentation examines the evolution of the methods in which the stories of motor racing have been told and the history preserved.

 

Joe Freeman | Second to One

Joseph Freeman is an automotive historian, writer, publisher, vintage racer, and racing car collector, well known in the racing world for his expertise on automotive subjects and as owner of the award-winning publishing house Racemaker Press of Boston. His talk will cover the history of some of the earlier champion race drivers who but for a stroke of bad luck, an unfortunate last-minute mistake, or just the intervention of fate, were never able to win America’s greatest race, the Indianapolis 500. Mr. Freeman’s reflections are based on his recent book Second to One: All But for Indy.

 

Trevor Lister | Truth is the Daughter of Time – presented via Zoom

Trevor entered the University of Canterbury on a public service scholarship, graduating with a double degree in Physics and Mechanical Engineering. On graduation, he worked in the Ministry of Transport in the setting and administration of Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, primarily on natural gas and LPG vehicle standards. This led to a secondment to a national research and development organization where he was responsible for research on a wider range of alternative motor vehicle fuels. It led also to an international consultancy in that area, including a stint as the New Zealand delegate to the International Natural Gas Vehicles Association.

Upon completion of that work, he returned to his foundation automotive design skills and his motorsports hobby. At which point he became an inspector and certifier on other peoples’ projects, as well as designing, building and racing his own cars. In semi-retirement, he took up teaching and tutoring pre-apprenticeship students in Mathematics, Science and Automotive Engineering. In full retirement, he assumed the role of Editor of the Newsletter of The Classic Motor Racing Club of New Zealand. That is when, searching for Newsletter stories, he came across the work of Donald Capps, and their common interest in old Maseratis. The upshot of working together on the histories of these cars became the main point in the presentation to this symposium. It appears that Maserati in the 1950s identified their competition cars by their engine numbers, not their chassis numbers, and that this process allowed for individual cars to have carried more than one identity. This has implications for the provenance of these cars.

Edited by DCapps, 25 October 2022 - 20:26.

[DCapps]

The schedule of Saturday (5 November):

 

Randy Cannon | Caesars Palace Grand Prix – presented via Zoom

Randall Cannon is a freelance journalist and author.  His first book, Stardust International Raceway, explored the convergence of organized crime influences and motorsports interests in the international capital of legalized gambling, Las Vegas.  Cannon’s current offering, Caesars Palace Grand Prix, drills even more deeply into that nexus while also tracing the threads of history that culminated in the only F1 events to date in that unique city.  Mr. Cannon will present at the Symposium from that research, as well as the incremental steps forward from Caesars Palace that will result in the return of F1 to that destination mecca of gambling, the 2023 Las Vegas Grand Prix.

 

Gordon Eliot White | Harry Miller: The Man and the Cars

Mr. White is a retired newspaper correspondent who covered Washington, D.C., Europe and the Far East for the Chicago American and other newspapers for 34 years. After he retired from newspaper work he became the Smithsonian Institution’s auto racing advisor, following a sport he had enjoyed since 1939. He since has written seven books on the history of American open-wheel racing, including a history of Fred Offenhauser and the Offenhauser racing engine.

He has served as the unofficial historian of the Harry A. Miller Club and as curator and archivist of more than 12,000 drawings, tracings and blueprints of Miller’s cars and engines, as well as of thousands of documents covering the history of American racing since early in the 20th century. His presentation will address Harry Miller and Miller’s impression on American racing as well as how aficionados rediscovered him after he had been all but forgotten and, over the past 40 years have unearthed and restored many of his cars.

 

Katharine Worth | Politicizing Grand Prix Racing in 1930s Germany and Great Britain – presented via Zoom

Katharine Worth is a graduate student in History at the University of Western Australia. Following her Master’s research at the University of Edinburgh on the banal and natural involvement of politics historically in the Olympic Movement, Ms. Worth’s current research traces the relationship of politics and nationalism in Formula One (and its motor racing predecessors).

Her presentation will analyze the 1930s through the lens of Grand Prix racing – and the aspirations to race at that level – in Germany and Great Britain, addressing how motor racing became increasingly connected to politics and nationalism, showcasing the complex relationship between Germany and Britain at the time. Ms. Worth’s discussion will highlight the British and German perspectives and usages of motor racing in the 1930s as motor racing became entangled with the politics and rising tensions of the period. Speed became the marker of “civilization” in Europe – a power Germany possessed and one that Great Britain envied.

 

Hannah Thompson | Charlotte’s Glory: The NASCAR Hall of Fame in the Queen City – presented via Zoom

Hannah Thompson is a cultural historian of the Carolina Piedmont and is new in the museum field with her current position with the Gaston County Museum of Art & History. Ms. Thompson also helps restore Coca-Cola “ghost signs” throughout the Southeast in her spare time. She examines the history of the NASCAR Hall of Fame from its inception in 2001 through the global pandemic, bringing into consideration why Charlotte was selected as the seat for the Hall and how the Hall has affected NASCAR and its fans. Ms. Thompson suggests that Charlotte is often overlooked in motorsports history despite its lasting impact on the auto racing world.

 

Mackenzie Kirkey | Organized Labor and NASCAR 

Mackenzie Kirkey received his MA in History from Brock University and his Undergraduate Degree in History from Bishops University. His presentation focuses on NASCAR driver Curtis Turner, and the efforts of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters to unionize NASCAR drivers in 1961, and the tactics used by NASCAR’s founder and President Bill France Sr. to try and thwart their attempts.

 

Keynote: Buz McKim | Moonshine and Its Connection to the American Auto Industry

Buz McKim, formerly historian at the NASCAR Hall of Fame in Charlotte, N.C., is a distinguished figure in the motorsports world and a much sought-after speaker at motorsports gatherings. Mr. McKim served as director of archives for International Speedway Corporation and as coordinator of statistical services for NASCAR. He is the author of “The NASCAR Vault: An Official History Featuring Rare Collectibles from Motorsports Images and Archives.”

Mr. McKim’s presentation explores the origins of modified stock car racing in the illegal distribution of untaxed adult beverages, or “moonshine.” He recounts the development of NASCAR in 1949 and its evolution in the 1950s from a truly “stock” competition to a manufacturer-supported testing ground for advances in the engineering and design of American automobiles. Mr. McKim’s talk describes the irony of how the automotive engineering modifications inspired by “wild country boys” led to all-around improvements in automotive technology.

 

Lauren Goodman | Lucy O’Reilly Schell: Innovator of French Motorsports 

Lauren Goodman received her MFA in screenwriting from the College of Motion Pictures Arts at Florida State University. While volunteering at the REVS Institute in Naples, Florida, she encountered one of two Maseratis entered by Lucy Schell in the 1940 Indy 500. Lauren’s research into Lucy’s time in France as a team owner and principal has been presented at REVS Institute. Lauren’s writing draws heavily on history and the lives of women whose achievements have been overlooked. Presently, she is developing Lucy’s story into a feature-length project. Lauren’s presentation will highlight Lucy’s role in motor racing history and her contributions to the sport.

 

Chris Lezotte | Real Racers Turn in Both Directions: Autocross, Life Skills, and the Woman Driver

After a career in advertising – some of it spent writing car commercials – Chris earned a master’s degree at Eastern Michigan University and a Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University. Now working as an independent scholar, Chris investigates the relationship between women and cars in a variety of contexts, including women’s participation in traditionally masculine car cultures (including motorsports) as well as representations of women and cars in popular culture. Her current project focuses on women’s growing involvement in autocross – the reasons for women’s participation; the methods by which women negotiate entry into a historically masculine environment; and how the autocross experience contributes to women’s identity, self-knowledge, and empowerment.

 

Roundtable: Daniel Simone, Moderator | Fifty Years After Title IX – On and Off the Track: A Roundtable on Women in Motorsports 

Daniel J. Simone earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Florida. He then taught at Monmouth University before serving as Curator at the NASCAR Hall of Fame from 2016-2021. Dr. Simone is on the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Voting Committee and delivers presentations and academic papers at universities and automotive museums across the United States and Canada. He currently serves as program assistant at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library, where he is co-processing and researching the Women’s Sports Foundation Collection and conducting oral histories and developing content for a digital exhibition.

The Michael R. Argetsinger Symposium on International Motor Racing History has provided a platform for excellent in-depth and thought-provoking presentations on the successes, struggles, and contributions of unheralded women racers and car owners across various auto racing disciplines.  The green flag for this roundtable discussion will wave with the panelists integrating these prior presentations into a brief historiographical discussion of women in motorsport.  From there, the panelists will pull from their multi-disciplinary backgrounds and markedly different professional experiences and discuss why, where, and how they extended the boundaries of women in motorsports history scholarship.  Finally, the audience will take the checkered flag with a challenge: to propose new themes and topics for future conversations, with an emphasis on the accomplishments women have made in motorsports without ever owning or taking the wheel behind a race car.     

Edited by DCapps, 25 October 2022 - 20:26.

[DCapps]

You can access the IMRRC page for the Argetsinger Symposium here (https://www.racingar...22-symposium-1/).

 

I think that it is an extraordinary set of presentations and well worth tuning into to watch.

 

Since its inception and first session in 2015, the Argetsinger Symposium has provided a truly unique forum for scholars and fellow enthusiasts to present papers on topics devoted to the history of motor sport.

 

My eternal regret is that Mike never got a chance to see it...

[2F-001]

Thank you for the link, Don. Some of those topics look most intriguing.

[DCapps]

It was a very interesting -- and successful in my opinion -- first day of the Argetsinger Symposium on Friday.

 

Certainly looking forward to Saturday's presentations.

[ensign14]

Are they being broadcast or recorded?

[B Squared]

Don, best to you and thanks for your great efforts in keeping Michael's name and great love of motorsports history with us. 

[DCapps]

Personally, I thought the Symposium was a great success; but then again, of course I would, you might suggest.

 

We had a good range of topics and an excellent group of presenters. The digital portion of the Symposium appears to have greatly exceed our expectations.

 

The number of people attending the sessions was more than even I anticipated, there being an excellent turnout on both Friday and Saturday.

 

The planning for Eighth Argetsinger Symposium has already been underway since it marks the 75th anniversary of the Watkins Glen Grand Prix and the 25th of the establishment of the IMRRC.

 

We are looking forward to 2023 and an even larger event.

 

I was disappointed that Dr. Patricia Yonge (University of Houston) was unable to attend due to health issues. She has been a quiet force in all this, being the co-founder and co-chair with me of the Symposium from the very beginning. Without Pat and her ideas and guidance, I doubt that we would have been able to make it far.

[DCapps]

On the IMRRC on the Symposium tab there are videos of the sessions we had last week.